Posts by Adam Oellermann

Similar Attacks Work Against Humans

It's to be expected that such attacks will be discovered, but they are no worse than the attacks that can be deployed against human drivers. For example, shining a 3W laser pointer in the eyes of a human driver will reduce their ability to detect obstacles. Audio attacks are similarly effective - playing Billy Ray Cyrus at sufficient volume will cause the driver to lose the will to live and steer of the nearest cliff.

Does this mean...

... that we now have to worry about intellectual property claims on squared corners, as well?

Stop sign because maybe octagons are the safe route for industrial design, now.

Reformed Methanol Fuel

I'm pleased that they're using Reformed methanol fuel. If they were using Dispensational methanol fuel, I'd say we were in for tribulation.

Compression

I have a better answer than throttling. Just filter out all the vowels. For binary content, just drop the low-order two bits - video you can do even better with "lossy" compression (ie leave out all blue pixels). No traffic shaping necessary, no caps, no worries: the customers will beat a path from your door.

Poor patient...

Imagine... sitting there all worried-like and the doctor says, "Does it hurt when I do <this>?"

<KRAANG!>

Gee Doctor - I hope it's not infectious!

@Jemma

My apologies for getting you so worked up. You appear not to have read my comment before replying to it, though: I do not insist at all that you dance ecstatically anywhere. I was merely responding to the outrageous suggestion that it is OK to respond in mere ridicule to a strong argument that you happen to dislike.

To widen the scope of your "evangelise this" question: which of all the religions has murdered the most? I think you'll find the correct answer is "atheist secular humanism". Certainly Hitler and Stalin each managed more murders in a short period of time that the monotheist religions combined have wrought in millennia.

The remainder of your ad hominem arguments about "PanzerPope", "kiddie fiddlers" and "my censer" I will simply allow as illuminations of my previous point. Keep up the good work!

Augustine Misquote

I believe Augustine actually said "Give me chastity and continence - but not yet". The quotation is from Book 8 of his Confessions, which is a great read. Fortunately he received a healthy dose of both, becoming a monk and one of the greatest thinkers and theologians of all time. Though he was instrumental in steering the Church through the Pelagian controversy, it was probably not until the time of the Reformation that his deep understanding of the vital doctrine of grace was fully appreciated.

I was tempted to go with one of the "saint" icons, but I think putting billg or steveb next to a posting about Augustine would probably earn one a swift crisping by lightning-bolt - hence flames.

Is it really stealing?

To all those who say "if I leave my house unlocked and you steal my telly, it's still stealing" I say that's the wrong analogy. He didn't enter their house, for example, nor did he steal anything. A better analogy would be "if I put my TV into your living room, and you watch it, it's stealing" - which seems a bit silly. Honestly, if you're going to beam your wifi all over my property, it should really be up to you to secure it if you don't want me to use it.

If I were the lad, I'd call the police and tell them that my neighbours were trespassing with their WIFI - see, officer, they've put it all over my house and I haven't given permission - and get them arrested back. Turn-about is fair play, as they say.

@Jacqui

I think it may be you. Bruce Schneier is an extremely well-known and respected cryptographer - no need to put the sneering quotes around guru there, as he wrote the book (Applied Cryptography) and is well-respected internationally for his research and practical work.

The fact that Phorm isn't in his area (after all, he's a cryptographer, not an advertising guy) doesn't mean he's trying to cover up by talking about an important subject which does happen to be in his area. Alleging that he's a "BT face spewing (content free) PR guff" proclaims lamentable ignorance of Scheier's many valued contributions and the regard in which he is held by his peers. A moment of Googling would have revealed to you some amazing facts about this great man:

* Bruce Schneier once factored a prime number.

* Bruce Schneier's secure handshake is so strong, you won't be able to exchange keys with anyone else for days.

* Bruce Schneier's tears can burn holes through an OpenBSD firewall. Lucky for us, Bruce Schneier never cries.

* Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it.

* SSL is invulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Unless that man is Bruce Schneier.

And many, many more.

Counterpane is a crypto/computer security consultancy which Schneier set up. BT bought it in 2006 (allegedly for at least US$20 million, which says something about Bruce Schneier's value in the industry) to expand their US-based security consultancy.

As a final point, it's always best to have an idea what you're on about before pouring your vitriol out all over the internets - it rusts the tubes, you see.

@millionaire distorting the market for

> How can any IT professional support this immoral behaviour? Giving away software for free

> simply puts paid IT workers out of work.

... or allows us to work on things that are actually useful, rather than writing the same old, same old year in and year out. It's a bit like liberating us from the drudgery of "subsistence programming" to allow us to work on new ideas. The parallels with the Industrial Revolution are intriguing - surely a lot of craftsmen (potters, handweavers and so forth) got burned, but the net result was that talented hands and brains were freed from the relentless drudgery and start specialising and thinking more deeply about productivity. The Industrial Revolution put paid workers out of work, too: but ultimately produced the largest increase in per capita wealth in history, with an attendant increase in leisure and prosperity across all social levels. Not without turmoil, of course, but would you go back to hoeing your row in grinding poverty, and starving to death every time the frost comes early?

It's somewhat melodramatic to suggest that Open Source can give us another Industrial Revolution, but if there are bits of software that can be commoditised and freed they certainly should be - otherwise all those paid IT workers you are worried about are actually parasites feeding on society by simply repeating the same work as is being done by others, and which only needs to be done once (or perhaps a small number of times, but certainly not once per business/web site/netbook model/smartphone etc).

The "free" thing is key to avoiding this needless repetition. Not free as in "hey, look, I can download Ubuntu for nothing" but free as in "hey, look, I can get all this stuff and improve it or use it as a starting point for my own stuff, and share the results with others".

I am a professional developer. I do most of my work on the Microsoft platform, but also spend quite a bit of time each week working on Linux-based systems. When it comes to Linux, I'm a self-confessed Ubuntard, but I try not to be bigoted about it. I have released some rather unimportant little bits of software under the GPL; much, much less than I have received by "apt-get install": but as developers become able to contribute their stuff back to the free software pool, EVERY developer gets much more out than they put in. And we can let non-developers benefit too! Mark Shuttleworth is in a position to make (by sponsoring) a much bigger contribution than most of us - to which I say, more power to him. Imagine the result if every software multi-multi-millionaire had the same level of vision.

I've been developing software for money for 16 years, and in that time my skill set has been totally obsoleted at least four times. Others who've been in the game for longer will have even more extreme examples of this. If you're in IT and you expect to get paid for churning out the same old stuff year after year, you should probably expect to get your (free) lunch eaten by Open Source pretty soon. If you're always willing to adopt new advances and keep pushing back the new frontiers, somehow there will always be room for you on the payroll.

@J

Hard to imagine a port of Linux to the C64's 8 bit 6502 processor, but there is LUnix...

http://hld.c64.org/poldi/lunix/lunix.html

Awesome... the world needs more programmers with too much time on their hands!